Hardware faults, absolutely. For instance, my N800 is currently undergoing warrany repair for the touchscreen sensitivity issue and will eventually, hopefully one day find its way back to me. That kind of thing can happen to early adopters, no biggie and not your problem.

The software side isn't so black and white though. Let me pick one of my personal pet peeves as an example (no, I'm not going to touch the GPS topic with the proverbial bargepole): the hardware keyboard language switching bug (2501/3407). This is a feature that definitely doesn't work as described in the documentation, looks like a software bug (although if not I would like to know before the warranty runs out) and probably not that hard to fix at that (but see below). Would it have been preferable/more reasonable from your point of view to return the device immediately or report the bug along with any relevant information I could find and wait for a fix as I have done?

In any case, at least now we know where we stand with respect to firmware updates for current devices. Disappointing, but a better position to be in than last week.

Yes, definitely. In fact I'd love pointers to where I should start looking for fixing the above bug, but the only reference to a specific package (hildon-input-method-plugins) is to something that doesn't even exist in binary form yet, including Fremantle.

Don't we all. Anyway, I think I've vented enough already, I'll shut up now :-)